Shadowboxing: The People’s Republic of China’s Use of Informal Trade Restrictions as a Rising Power

Since 2010, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has intermittently imposed informal trade restrictions on third countries following political disagreement. These occurrences reveal that the PRC increasingly sees the economic domain as a vector to assertively pursue its political interests as a rising power. At the same time, maintaining a favourable international environment to support its continued economic rise remains a key objective of the PRC’s grand strategy. An informal approach to trade restrictions offers the PRC the possibility to engage in coercive influencing while safeguarding its ability to stay connected to the global economy and its main protagonists. This is achieved through deniable and selective coercive measures that avoid raising already acute generalised threat perceptions within and among target states in order to prevent firm balancing responses from emerging. However, as recent experience with the PRC’s initiatives highlights, coercive measures have limitations as a wedge strategy. Most notably, rather than dividing targets, they may serve to strengthen ties between them.